


As in Animal Life

by kvikindi



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 08:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3642993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is: people think it must be unpleasant. Because that's what they think that anger is. And maybe it is, for them. Bruce can't know what normal life's like. Is it a physical discomfort, like nausea or a headache, like an ache in the joints, an unscratchable itch? For him it's— not. But then, he's always been different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As in Animal Life

**Author's Note:**

> For [prettyboysdontlookatexplosions](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com), who wanted Bruce and/or Natasha fic.

The thing is: people think it must be unpleasant. Because that's what they think that anger is. And maybe it is, for them. Bruce can't know what normal life's like. Is it a physical discomfort, like nausea or a headache, like an ache in the joints, an unscratchable itch? For him it's— not. But then, he's always been different. Always, when he was a kid at the doctor's— and he was at the doctor's a lot as a kid: broken arm, dislocated shoulder, taped-up fingers, black eyes, fractured ribs— he would stare at the bright round cartoon faces on the pain rating charts they showed to him and feel like they might as well be hieroglyphics. There was no face there that looked like his face. He wasn't sure he knew what those expressions meant. For him, pain was undistinguishable from any other feeling. But anger was—

Well.

He hadn't started with Vita-Rays, as a twelve-year-old boy. He'd built a replica of the atom bomb, first. Every piece tiny and perfectly detailed. It was the Trinity bomb, which had killed nobody. Bruce dreamed about it: exploding over the earth, wordless and hot and annihilating. So pure a force from so small a thing of matter. There was the old world, and there was this other world, where all the accepted savage mechanics ceased to have any meaning to them. It would be the same, later, what he saw in Erskine's serum— mass suddenly losing its meaning, energy bursting out from within— but that was the subtly more civilized version. First there was the bomb: a long scream in the desert. A wound that could never ever be trapped inside of muffling bones and skin.

He doesn't tell Stark about that, after he moves into the tower. There's a lot he doesn't talk about with Stark. It's strange to meet the child of your childhood hero. (Bruce thinks of a photo: July, Alamogordo: Louis Slotin, Oppenheimer, and Howard Stark. Stark looks littler than the people around him. His shirt is unbuttoned, his hat askew. He's looking to one side; you can't see what he's seeing. Sunlight cuts a stripe across his neck.)

Also: he and Stark are different kinds of people. You might think they're the same, because they're both. Well. Prodigious. That's really the best word for them. But the world is full of prodigies. Children; monsters. They just happen to be two of that species.

But he lives in Stark's house now. A civilized mansion. A new kind of house for the modern age. When you make a mess there, someone else cleans it up. When you want something, you just file a request. (Sometimes he doesn't even have to go that far, actually; intimate to Tony that you want something, anything, and it's liable to appear. You have to be careful, with Tony, what you say you want.) It's a world that operates on magic, in short. He's seen magic, after all, real magic. So he knows what he means when he talks about this. The thing about magic is: you can't see how it works. You never see the mechanism down at the root of it. This can be dangerous. Just read a fairy story.

Bruce has lived and worked where magic was a fact of life. It made people careful. It made them suspicious. They knew that the world was a series of transactions, a constant interaction, part seen, part unseen. They wouldn't be surprised, he thinks, by physics. At some atomic level, we are always trading things.

* * *

Natasha shows up unannounced at times: a trimly attired shadow drinking decaf at breakfast.

"There's places in this world where you can't get coffee," she says, when Stark brings it up one day. "Stupid to risk the shakes. Bad planning."  
  
Bruce understands this, though he's never been a secret agent. Don't want what you might not have someday.

"Trust me," Stark says, "there is no place where I can't get coffee."

Some emotion, repressed, under Natasha's features. A blur of laughter? Bruce tilts his head at it. He once saw her crack a joke with rebar jutting through her shoulder. Her blood had slowed till it was almost black. Her features didn't change at all. Bruce had pressed the heel of his hand on the wound. They all made jokes when they were dying. It was just what you did, sometimes. But she wasn't afraid; he could feel it in her body. He'd never been so close to her without sensing some fear.

Above them, the sky had been recrudescent with starlight. He'd missed that in his new life more than anything. The universe: insistently, astonishingly present, too beautiful to be what it is, made up of heat and loss and time, and so much— so much of it, going on forever.

He doesn't know why he remembers this at breakfast. He watches Natasha. Her movements are measured. Always so careful, clipped, precise. There's a half-inch shadow under her shirt-strap, all that marks the place where the rebar had been; it's surprising, really, that she doesn't have more scars.

She'd survived, of course. She always survives.

* * *

Stark talks a lot, and Bruce doesn't talk. That's how they work. It's a dynamic. Bruce is amazed, in awe, sometimes, of Stark's talking. The words just seem to run out of him. Without effort, without pause. Whereas Bruce mumbles, pauses, ducks his head, sometimes struggles to speak. He knows why; it's not— he's done the therapy, okay. He's exhausted by knowing. It doesn't change anything. Point out to a topiary that it's distorted by gardeners; see if it grows a different way.

He doesn't mind, anyway, that Tony talks. Most of the time, he likes listening. It's true, after all, that they speak the same language. Being a monster-child counts for something; it counts for something that they move at the same speed, flicking through screens of information, skipping step after step without confirmation, starting sentences they have no need of finishing. It's odd to return to the outer world, after. Everything's slower; Bruce feels more helpless, more prone to think, when struggling through conversations: Why, why is it so hard to follow me?

Sometimes even these interactions are too much. He can't explain, can't articulate the physical knowledge that every body is a threat. Just— any body, the knowledge of a body in the building. The back of his neck crawls; he's cold; like his own body's haunted. Like he carries the ghost inside of his skin. Which he does, he supposes, for a given value— if you stretch the definition—

He feels it swelling in him.

* * *

His rooms at the tower are full of flowers. Orchids, lilies, succulents. On the narrow terrace, he hybridizes apples. People don't know you can grow apples in Manhattan. But of course the climate is right for it; upstate there are orchards, some centuries old. His own trees are smaller, grown in clay pots, but he gets a steady crop from them. The fruit is small and crisp and hard, like so many heavily dusted gems, but good for eating. It tastes like autumn. (A split lip; booze sinking into shag carpet; red and blue lights striking the screen door; the bite of the wind; bittersweetness.)

Steve Rogers is off being S.H.I.E.L.D.'s poster-boy hero, but still finds time to show up in New York. He always wants to talk, not just talk. Bruce thinks he's started reading self-help books, maybe— _Seven Highly Effective Habits of Team Leaders_ , or whatever. _Six Steps to Success With Your Corporate Superteam_. After a while, it seems like he just likes the flowers.

"I was always a city boy," he says. "Guess to me it seems like magic. I never had much of a green thumb."

Bruce says, "It's a good hobby— I think— I mean, growing things. I try not to think of it like science. Well. It's a little bit of science."

Steve has a quizzical gaze fixed on a flying-duck orchid, _Caleana major_. (Trying to keep it alive was a trick; it should have died outside of Australia. Tony, of course, had imported it; what did he care, if it lived or died? He could always buy another. He hadn't realized how much it was a burden, how Bruce had thought, I can't stand it if one more thing dies. It belonged to him now; its life was his. He had to protect it, to make it thrive.) "It looks like a hummingbird," Steve says.

"A duck."

"You think so?"

"Not me, just— whoever named it. Flying-duck orchid." The petals are mauve, purple, and gold. Bruce can see the skeleton bird they form: like something blown from glass, or a piece of Lalique jewelry. How could something like that have been made? How could nature have led to it? Why would he think he could keep it alive?

Steve's presence in the room makes him uneasy. He wonders if Steve knows why this is; how much does Steve really know about Bruce? It's strange, the way they're all connected: bound in their different ways by blood. Does Steve know that Bruce studied the inside of his body, the red blood cells? Bruce has seen the delicate microstructures there, the ones that maybe even Steve hasn't seen, that mark him out as subtly inhuman. But beautiful, those structures; or so he'd once thought. Steve himself is beautiful: designed to be. Clean and golden and righteous; stable of purpose. Bruce finds him alien, alien as a flower. I could never be like that, he thinks; no wonder. No wonder he is what he is, and I'm not.

Steve says, "I guess I always found people easier than plants." A wry smile. "I could tell them what to do, and they'd do it. Fewer worries about sunlight and watering."

He deals with people, of course, on a different level. Not at the level of molecules, atoms; not even at the level of anatomy. Try telling an open wound not to bleed. Try telling a cell not to divide. No; all you can do is _press down press down_ , contain the damage, control the infection...

"Erskine grew orchids," Bruce says after a moment. "It's— something I read, when I was in college. He grew orchids in his office during the war."

"In New York?"

Bruce nods.

Steve looks away. "I didn't know that," he says. "I didn't know very much about him."

"He won prizes. I always wondered if he might've liked it better."

"Do you? Like it better?"

"Orchids don't scream," Bruce says.

* * *

All these stories about our scientist heroes, the ones that biographers love to share. Here's one: Oppenheimer, long after the war, in exile amongst the Virgin Islands. A friend caught a sea turtle in Maho Bay. The natural course, of course, was to cook it; but Oppenheimer couldn't bear to. He was reminded of the animals out in the desert: Alamogordo, the Jornada of Death. Animals that lived and animals that perished. Animals that, though already dead, would live on for a while in irradiated bodies.

Is there a moral to this story? Not really. Bruce thinks about it, though, a lot. Is he Oppenheimer in this story? Is he the bomb? One of the animal victims, perhaps?

He can't eat meat anymore. He's just seen too many bodies, red and wet, with the bone showing white in them.

An analyst might say this was not the problem. The problem was one body, repeated again and again; that was what an analyst would say. There was an Original Body, which he can't ever bury. An Original Scene he was witness to once. The bone showing white. Red and wet. The rain coming down. Shards of teeth on the sidewalk. The white bone glowing in the red wet, the splinter of bone: the— oh God, he knows the name of that bone, the, the, no, don't let yourself think what it is—

A body-blow, an interruption to the atom, and after that fission. Fragments.

But every body is a new animal. He knows; he remembers sometimes, in his dreams, how it felt to kill them. Like you'd dream about a dream of a dream, a landscape that never really coheres, where every image seems heavy with portent and painful. He feels how it feels to grind a head against asphalt, to crush a ribcage in his hand, to refuse— just— refuse to be hurt.

This was not how the topiary was shaped. This was not how the gardener made the plant. This was radical, meaning: from the root. _Radicalis_. Meaning: rip up the whole garden, tear it to pulp. This was contravening the law of the house, the house of the body, and oh, the pure raw joy of it, the song of it singing all through his corpuscles! The relief! Like the pressure seal had been cracked! Blood surged through his heart, through all the starved muscle. He had dug his heels down into the ground at last, and they would never, never drag him out. No one would hurt him. No one. No one. No one. No one again.

But he wakes from dreams like this shaking with nausea, and barely makes it to the toilet before he vomits.

* * *

Natasha eats the apples he grows on the terrace. She has a knack for peeling them; she can do it in one slow circle with her knife. She eats the pieces wet off the blade. She sits outside in the autumn sun. Bruce watches her with an uncertain grin— his default expression, shoulders slightly hunched. Stark says it's like he's showing his neck, like he's trying to roll over, submit, like a dog. _Which is frankly fucking deceitful,_ Stark says, _considering how fast you could turn me into Play-Doh_. But he couldn't, really. Stark doesn't understand.

"Million dollar view, huh," Bruce says to Natasha. "Sometimes I just watch storms coming. You can see them from miles, from out in New Jersey." The Hudson is a colorless strip, reflecting the surface of clouds in the sky. Down on Park, crowds are moving in oddly patterned sweeps, looking like little fish or ants. A cab turns; horns flare; there's music on a corner. Up and to the left, Central Park's a painted angle. He can see all the way across Manhattan.

"I like it," she says, without looking at him, "because you can see how little everything matters. Perspective."

"Is that really what you think? No," he says, because he guesses. "You said it to see if I think you think that." You've got to think fast to keep up with Natasha. He's gotten in the habit of running through schemes. Every conversation is like a chess match. Chess would be easier; he'd know the rules.

"I don't think anything. I just do what I can do." Her knife nicks into the apple. A cider scent.

"Me too," he says.

Her eyes flick to him. He's surprised her, he thinks.

They watch the sun set. The air this time of year is blue and golden, then grainy, violet, as night rolls in. Square windows of light flicker on in the buildings. Small figures framed by darkness enact the everyday. A woman bakes bread. A man watches television. Another man smokes a cigarette, leaning far out past a windowsill, his breath gray in the dusk. Pigeons flock and squabble over a railing. It's still warm. September.

"Are you afraid of me?" Natasha asks.

Bruce doesn't react. He considers the question. "I'm afraid of everyone," he says. "I know people think it's— an act of some kind. Like I'm trying to make myself harmless, or something."

"I don't think that." She twirls the knife absently. It glints in the twilight, silver-black. "Everyone you meet could be an enemy tomorrow. It's a logical perspective."

"But you're not afraid. Of most people."

"I don't consider most people a threat." The tip of the knife goes into the chair-arm. It's not really quite like it's been sheathed.

"I'd never forgive myself," Bruce says, "if I hurt you. Any of you. You know that already. I'd rather die."

She doesn't say anything. He can't see her face clearly. The darkness has fallen over it.

Late that night he dreams in phrases. _You think I want to hurt you? You think I wanted to hurt you? You did this! Why did you do this to me? Why would you make me do this? I never wanted, I never, this isn't what I wanted, I never wanted to be like this..._

In the dream, he's out in a boat at sea: far, far away from any landfall. He can see auroras over his head. His breath comes in clouds. He trails his hand in the water. The voices he hears are like weather patterns, outside the scope of his command, a phenomenon he observes while drifting. The water is cold against his fingers. There is nothing alive for miles around him, only his body, nothing else, nothing human.

* * *

Maybe part of him sees Stark— grudgingly: Tony— and feels jealous. It's not a rational response. He doesn't think about it. It's just there, like being hungry, or thirsty, or tired. He watches the way Tony moves through rooms, like the space that he occupies in this world has never not been guaranteed. More: like he's pushing himself to be larger, demanding more than the world wants to give. On the other hand, Bruce's own modus operandi is: always be disappearing.

(Fold yourself up so that no one can see you. A tiny, dense, super-hot, fierce ball. He remembers learning the Chandrasekhar limit, the maximum allowable stellar mass before a star can't stay a white dwarf, before it must explode or collapse. It's a physical law of the universe.2.765 × 1030 kg, we think. 1.39 times the mass of the sun. That's the number to stay below, if you want to be stable. But then: what object can choose its own mass?)

Then there's Pepper, the perfect empress-consort. A girl from California or Boston, a girl with warmth and wit and taste, gracious and fondly exasperated. A normal girl, who'd never not been loved, who thought the world was good, that everyone could be rescued, that life would redeem itself in the end. He sees her come alive when discussing artwork, the Stark Collection, in front of a marble plinth that Rodin had carved into the Magdalen and Christ. The two white figures are sunk into the stone, not quite human; the sculpture looks barely half-finished.

"You can touch it if you want," Pepper says. "I won't tell. It's pretty solid. I promise it won't break."

The whole thing must weigh twice what Bruce does. Still, he keeps his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He can't pinpoint why he feels afraid.

"Tony's great-grandfather commissioned half this stuff." Pepper's showing him around the Long Island mansion. "He's not interested, of course— Typical Tony. He will be, I think, if he holds on to it. You know how it is; people change a lot."

"You think so?" This is not what he thinks.

"You should've seen me when I was a teenager." He's surprised by the wryness of her grin. "Pink hair. I promise you. Lit mag pretensions."

"And just look at you now."

"Yes, still atoning for my sins."

Bruce wanders on, past a tall Klimt painting; an Art Nouveau cabinet; a Degas dancer cast in bronze. "I was just the same," he says. "Nerdy, glasses. Stuttered for a while. Curly hair. Got in lots of fights. Suspended from school once."

He expects her to laugh, or say, _You're kidding me! Get a load of Rebel Without a Cause here!_ It's what Tony would have done. But she touches his hand: a cool, brief motion of comfort. She doesn't say anything, because— he thinks— that's what she's good at, of course. That's her art, knowing what to say and when.

"So," he says, trying to make his voice light. "You know. Haven't changed much."

"—Oh, Bruce," she says.

* * *

Once, Natasha catches him watching Pepper and Tony. They're at a party, one of Tony's parties (the only ones Bruce goes to, because: he can run away.) Natasha says, "You look like the Little Match Girl."

She's snuck up behind him, soundless in a silk dress. He tries unsuccessfully to master his flinch. "Wow," he says. "Did they program you with that story?" Then regrets it at once. "Sorry. Sorry, I'm— I shouldn't have said that."

"Oh, for God's sake, Banner. You think _that_ was mean?" She shakes her head, long smooth hair shining and even. "You're like a puppy dog. Try to push back a little."

Moving a pawn forwards, he thinks. Testing his defenses. He sighs. "It's not a strategy. I'm not trying to play you. Can't I just want to be— you know— a nice guy?"

She looks at him, her white brow wrinkled. "How is that not a strategy?"

"I'm not trying to make anyone do anything. I just want—" He gestures, then doesn't know how to explain it. "I just want not to make anyone do anything."

Silently, she absorbs this. She looks beautiful, he thinks belatedly. He himself feels uncomfortable in his body. He's wearing a set of tailored clothes, drinking sparkling water. He'd been thinking abstractedly about bird life. About Chernobyl, to be specific: where, long after irradiation, birds had not only survived, but flocked back along the Pripyat River. Black storks, egrets, garganeys, bitterns. No humans were allowed near that part of the river. For miles, there was just the Exclusion Zone. The soil was toxic, the cities deserted; rust ate and overran the roofs. Yet birds bred in the factories. Wolves hunted bison. Somehow animal life returned.

It was the apples that made him think of it. How they soaked in the New York smog and survived.

Natasha says, "Before you know it, you'll turn into one of those preservationist people." Her opinion is expressed in the way her lip curls. "You'd be surprised how often ex-operatives end up that way. Pacifist, vegan, the whole nine yards— you know, leave no trace upon the earth."

"That doesn't sound like a bad way to live."

"In a fantasy, maybe." She shrugs. "The way I see it, even if you were dead, you'd still be leaving footprints. Hell, animals leave footprints. Primordial humans. Dead bodies do it. Graves. Fossils. You can't erase the fact of your existence."

She knows what it's like to want that, of course. Sometimes he forgets.

"You know, Feynman— Richard Feynman," he says, "pointed out in one of his lectures that there's no such thing as an outline. I mean, it's kind of obvious, if you know any science at all, but it's just, you don't think about it. We draw outlines, like everything comes with fences. _Here is where I end and the rest of the world begins_. But it's all really, you know, stuff happening in space. Stuff changing places. Constant interactions."

" _Stuff_ , is that a scientific term?"

"Sort of."

"So. Stuff is happening. And we're here, and we can't get out of it."

Bruce resents the corrective implication. He takes a sip of sparkling water. "Well," he says. "I can still be a nice guy."

"Sure," Natasha says. "And you can be a vegan pacifist."

* * *

For Christmas, Tony gives him a Bardsey Island apple— not just the fruit, but a whole tree in a bucket. It comes from Wales. Its parent tree was planted a thousand years ago, by monks. "A _thousand years_ ," Tony says. "That's as many as _ten hundreds_." Bruce accepts the gift dubiously. Tony has drawn a cartoon Hulk on the plastic bucket. _Grr. Arrg_ , its speech bubble says.

On New Year's Eve, everyone except him fights Doombots. In New York, at least, he tends to form the rearguard: the cost of actually bringing him in is too high to risk if not necessary. So he stays at home, wandering the empty tower, thinking about quantum entanglement as snow falls outside and black smoke rises from Brooklyn, somewhere south of the Queensboro Bridge.

On New Year's Day, he wakes to find Natasha sleeping in a chair on his terrace. Her breathing's silent. It's just past five AM. Manhattan isn't quiet, but it's shadowed and cold. Everyone is alive, Bruce supposes. He doesn't wake her— she could have come in if she'd wanted; he has no illusions about this— but drapes a wool blanket over her body and goes to make coffee. Decaffeinated.

On Twelfth Night, he does get called out to fight. This time it's something out of the dark dimensions. There's a lot of talk about calling someone named Strange, but Bruce isn't paying attention by then; he's gone to the other place that he goes. Which is— it's—

_Sometimes he pictures it like the house in Albuquerque, where they'd lived just after his dad lost his job for the first time, when he was teaching part-time at UNM. A two-bedroom place with sullen, chainsmoking neighbors and a chop shop across the street, so that the police were always knocking on doors, asking, Sir, Ma'am, have you witnessed anything suspicious, though everyone knew to stay tight-lipped. There was a closet in that house that Bruce could fit in, and that's where he'd go, with the Feynman Lectures, or his dad's old particle physics books. He remembers the cheap thin faux-wood panels. They smelled like menthol cigarettes and mothballs. He would push his big glasses up his nose and hug his knees close to his chest, and read about space-time, quantum behavior, the atom bomb, radiation, thermodynamics. Other things would happen outside, but here was comfort. He looked at pictures of Howard Stark. He traced a map of the bomb with his finger. First they had tried a gun-type assembly. Two subcritical hemispheres held apart in the shell. When you combined them, then you got critical mass. Eventually they didn't use this design. But Bruce at that age liked it. He imagined he held the two pieces safe, one in each hand. It's not fatal, as long as you don't let them touch. But what if. What if._

_He didn't think about it. Some other part of his body was always, always thinking about it. But that didn't count; it was down in his flesh. It wasn't really a part of him. He didn't know how to explain this division. He felt hungry and thirsty, but for violence. There was something in the Bible about that. Hungry and thirsty weren't things you thought. They were happening in other parts of your body. You had no power over them. You would die if you got too hungry or thirsty. Everybody knows this._

_Now he doesn't have to be hungry or thirsty._ And you won't be, _the voice says,_ ever again. _The voice doesn't like being hungry or thirsty. The voice says,_ You can stay in the good place now. _The voice is going to take care of it. He can stay there and read; he can stay there forever, safe and warm and smelling of menthol, his glasses slipping down his nose, mourning doves hooting in the desert distance, cicadas clicking somewhere in the dusk... No one will rattle the doorknob. No one will kick down the door. No one will hurt him. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one. No one no one no one ag—_

On Epiphany he wakes up feeling hungover and like he's been peeled out of his own skin. He briefly considers going back to sleep. Instead he levers himself up. He's wearing an old t-shirt ("Bat Boy Proves Riemann Hypothesis!") that's about four sizes too big; he has no memory of putting it on. He has no memory of— the last day or so, really.

"Welcome back," Natasha says.

She's standing in the doorway, he discovers when he rotates his head. The gesture costs him more than it should.

"Exposure therapy?" he asks. Meaning: Why are you here?

"You were shouting in your sleep. You needed a minder."

"Once I'm back, I don't usually go out as easily."

"You needed a minder," she says again, and disappears down the hall to the breakfast room.

He follows her, bleary and at a distance. "What happened to— whatever it was?"

"Dormammu. We ended up finding the portal to the dark dimensions. It turned out to be McCarren Pool. He's gone, and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s got the whole thing shut down. Not our department, not our problem."

"Oh," Bruce says, feeling lost. "Okay. That all seems... anticlimactic."

"It wasn't. Trust me. You were there."

He winces. "Did I break anything?"

"Fourteen coffee shops, a bowling alley, a yoga studio, several million dollars' worth of condo developments..." Her smile flickers, hard to read as ever. "Most of Bedford Avenue, so what I'm saying is: it could be worse."

"Yeah, well, they charge us for all of that stuff."

"Think of it as job creation," she suggests.

He laughs haltingly. His chest feels like it's rusted.

They stand there for a long moment.

"...I'll let Stark know you're awake," she says.

Then she's gone. She'd been wearing a sweatshirt. He hadn't focused enough to see what it'd said.

After a moment, he sees his Chemex on the stove. She'd left a half-pot of coffee warming. The whole kitchen's full of the smell of new-ground coffee: a dark and comfortable, everyday scent.

* * *

What happened to Erskine's orchids, after he died? The history books don't actually say. Somehow it got lost, this biographic detail. Was a record even kept? This was life during wartime. Bruce can just imagine that it didn't matter. Someone swept those shelves of plants into a trash heap, indifferent to their un-animal fate. Erskine's prize specimens, his gloriosas, his English ghost orchid— carried across the Atlantic by hand, on ship— tipped away as so many vegetal weeds. Maybe someone, a secretary or janitor, stole one away. Maybe someone inherited them. But who would have inherited from Erskine? There was no one. His wife and children were dead. Soon, although he didn't know it, the rest of his family would follow: two sisters, their husbands; six nieces and nephews. The bombs; the camps; infection; starvation. Oh, Abraham. No inheritors. Unless Stark— but Stark was surely gone by then. Like a rocket trailing sparks into the future: towards Los Alamos, Trinity, eventually Tony.

Then Bruce himself. More or less. In the end.

* * *

The Bardsey Island apple blossoms in the springtime. Bruce has done a good job of grafting it. The flowers are sweet and scatter petals on the terrace. Then rain sweeps through and re-scatters them, lifting them up in the wet April smog, then hurling them out to the canyons of Manhattan. Somewhere, Bruce thinks, those petals are still moving, plowed underneath the heels of boots, or bruised against a yellow cab's windshield. No one knows they came across the ocean, from clay soil, the thousand-year-old roots of a tree that was planted in violent times, when no one then living on this earth could have imagined atom bombs or gamma radiation. It's strange what survives and doesn't survive.

"We should get you a beehive," Stark says. "I understand they're very trendy."

"Do not give me a beehive," Bruce says.

"We could set you up with your own stall at the Greenmarket."

"No."

"Jolly Green Giant Produce."

"Stop."

"Hey, be the change you want to see. Think global, buy local. Is that how it goes?"

"That's a problematic ecophilosophical tenet."

"Okay, whatever, we can make it a global deal if you want."

"Also, I'm allergic to bee stings."

Although he doesn't know if he is anymore. Maybe he'd just turn into the Hulk. It's hard for anything to hurt him these days.

Later, Pepper calls him. "Why is Tony pricing orchards?"

* * *

Under one of the buildings on Bedford Avenue, the construction crew makes a discovery: a privy from the Revolutionary War. There are animal bones in it, and brass buttons, and glass beer bottles, and pieces of painted ceramic plates. It's in the news for a day or so: a novelty story. Strange, to think that— under the surface— all of this was always there. New York is a city that erases the past, but it never seems to get down to the root. Tear up the street and you find it still waiting, in broken pottery, in graves. Under the ruins of the yoga studio the Hulk destroyed, there's a miniature portrait of a girl. She wears an Empire-waisted dress, and her eyes are shining. She's been dead for two hundred years or more. She looks so alive, though. Bruce sees the painting. The fine line of her clavicle is shadowed; you can almost see her heartbeat, the proof that she lived.

* * *

"In the autumn," Natasha says, "I'll teach you to make apple sharlotka. That's a kind of Russian apple cake."

She's stretched out in a deck chair on the terrace, a magazine in her lap, sunglasses over her eyes. She looks like a teenager, Bruce thinks. She's still young. He forgets that she's another kind of monster-child. A cultivar distinct from himself or Tony, but the same species, surely.

He says, "In the autumn, huh? You think you'll be around then?"

She has a tendency to vanish. He doesn't ask questions. He doesn't want to know who it is she's been killing. Sometimes he watches her as she plays with her knife. The blade is always clean, clean enough to eat off. But he has no illusions about the person she is. The people they both are.

She says, "I thought you'd say, _Did they program you with that?_ I'm not really known for my cooking."

Bruce wipes his brow. He's repotting a winesap apple. The sun is hot on the back of his neck. "I said I was sorry."

"It was a valid response. And I didn't say you were wrong. Some things they did program me with. Oddly, fairy tales were not among those. Maybe they thought we'd get confused. So many little girls lost in the forest, never a girl who was the huntsman or the wolf."

Bruce thinks inadvertently of his own childhood. He'd outgrown fairy tales so early. He'd made himself another kind. You were a bomb, or you were a shadow on the pavement. You were blood on the pavement, bone showing white, red and wet while the rain came down, shards of teeth and the sound it made when she— or you were—

His face must show something. Natasha says quickly, "I learned to cook, though. I like to be competent. I'll show you."

"Exposure therapy?" he says.

"Just facing things doesn't make you less frightened."

"So... what is it?"

She doesn't answer him.

* * *

It's true that facing things doesn't make you less frightened. In the autumn, it often comes back to him. Not consciously, and not in a way that disables. The remote flesh of his physical body somehow reacts to the weather shift, and he dreams the Hulk's dreams, of hunting and killing. Of satisfaction. (His dreams. His.) He walks in Central Park, where the red leaves look bloodied. The first ice cracks like bones in the gutters when horses put their hooves on it. He feels a lot of sympathy with carriage horses. Poor things; they didn't choose this life. They are heavy-faced, placid, born to the harness.

He sees a coyote on a trail at dusk once. New York gets them in the city a lot. It's brown-furred, eyes golden. It looks right at him. He stays very still, so it won't be frightened. He doesn't want to frighten it; why should he? It just wants to live, to survive; that's all. That's its imperative.

There were coyotes back in New Mexico, too. He heard them at night in the summer sometimes, howling to each other from mesa to mesa. He knew that they weren't saying anything really. Even as a little boy he knew that animals had no language, so there couldn't be a message in the sounds. But he felt like there was a message in them— an incantation against loneliness, maybe, a basic cry that meant _I am here_ , and that maybe wasn't aimed towards anyone at all, just the world at large, whatever was out there: _I am here, I'm here_ , _I'm here_.

( _Stay quiet, okay?_ she'd said, and _Don't make a sound._ He'd tried so hard; he'd been so good.)

"Hey," he says to the coyote, and immediately feels dumb. "It's okay; I'm not going to hurt you. You should probably get out of here. There are cars and stuff. You've got to be careful."

The coyote swivels its ears, unfazed, then lopes off in the darkness. 

Bruce watches it go. He feels strange, unencumbered. He likes knowing that there are wild things in the city, that nature continues its abstruse mechanism, that this secret undercurrent of life exists. He doesn't know why. It's like seeing the stars, a blunt reminder that he is only a cog in this— that he oversees nothing, is only carried forwards, some small component of a vast and neverending sky. 

* * *

In Los Alamos, during the Manhattan Project, in the summer of '44 or '45, there had been rumors of a black bear in the mountains. The locals made fun of this kind of story— there were no bears, they said, in the Jemez. But some scientists insisted that they had seen it, just out of the corners of their eyes, and fear of it stalked the young families of the outpost. When would the bear come down from the mountains? Was it hungry? What did it want from them? These were not, for the most part, wilderness people. All they knew was that they felt very frightened. Maybe they needed a reason to not sleep at night, to keep a rifle beside the bed. And maybe they wanted to believe in the bear. Atomic physics were lost on such a creature, so they would never have to explain themselves, never justify their work, never wait for judgment. It was only tooth and claw, a ghost and a specter that moved in the branches of the pinon pines, and after the war no one saw it again. Which is not to say that it never existed, or that it, if it existed, it could not have survived. 

* * *

When he gets home, he can smell apples cooking. So: Natasha's let herself in. He thinks at first that he's going to mind this; he's not sure that he can be around bodies. And hers is and isn't a threatening body; she's difficult like that, she's very complex. It's worse because he likes her, because he feels affection. In a way, that makes her more frightening to him. 

But when he sees her, he doesn't feel sick or nervous. She's barefoot, with a butterfly bandage on her shoulder, perched on a countertop, reading a book. He knows she knows he's there— try hiding something from her. But for a long moment, he stands and watches her. Her smooth hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her pulse beats in the line of her neck. Bruce thinks of the statue that Pepper had shown him, the white block of marble carved by Rodin. She'd told him he could touch it, but he'd been too frightened. There's so much in the world that he can destroy. He knows it; he's always known it. He doesn't want to destroy anymore.

At last Natasha looks up, her gaze very level. Her eyes communicate a lot. She says, "All right?"

"Yes," Bruce says. He sets his coat on the countertop. He crosses the room to where she is. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Shearwater's "Animal Life."
> 
> The MCU history referenced here comes from [Prince of the Apple Towns](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2693231/chapters/6026588), my Howard Stark fic, to whose universe this belongs.


End file.
